Wow. You have the victim part down pat – Oscar material if in the Foreign Film category only you being Canadian and all. OTOH, you need lots of work coming back from your ‘role’ to reality.
Robert de Niro put-on something like fifty pound to play Jake LaMotta in ‘Raging Bull.’ Got the Oscar, lost the weight and went back to being himself.
See any parallels here?
I refuse to ignore our barbaric behavior just because I’m supposed to pretend anyone in American uniform is a hero. A barbarian in an American uniform is still a barbarian.
Perhaps. Or maybe the Shia People’s Liberation Front might attack the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Shia People.
And a scared kid with a gun isn’t Attilla either.
I’m perfectly willing to debate the issues. What I’m not willing to do is sit here and be called a chickenhawk for engaging in the debate. Apparently, the ‘chickenhawk’ slur, despite being ad hominem and extremely offensive, is acceptable in Great Debates since it gets used a lot and the mods don’t seem to mind. That’s their decision. My decision is that I simply won’t engage in debates where that’s the likely outcome. I’m frankly sick of it.
You guys keep claiming that you welcome debate, but as soon as someone comes along who attempts to take the other side you can’t resist going all snotty and ad-hominem. Thus endeth the debate. Enjoy your echo chamber.
I have to agree with you on this point, Der Trihs. I cringe every time someone brings this up as a point.
Agreed (again).
Certainly not on purpose. Yeah, I know, it doesn’t matter if it’s an accident or not - they’re still dead. But there is a difference to be made between an Iraqi that is sitting quietly in his home, waiting for the fighting to stop, and an Iraqi firing an IED at you.
Then I should introduce you to my best friend, as he is none of the above.
Or because someone’s enemies start to attack our troops.
Another reason why our troops need to get out now - nerves are completely shot. Certainly not a reason to wish death on them, though.
Again, they are engaging the troops, who are fighting back. Chances are, the troops they are attacking/killing are not the same ones who dropped the cluster bomb years ago.
These occurences should probably be grouped in with the “step[ped] out of a car at the wrong time” category.
Are the escapees running away from the soldiers, while they pick off each one with glee?
If a couple of troops do something like this, it shouldn’t be representative of all troops.
I see this more as a problem with our idiot leaders/piss-poor intelligence gathering.
The point I am trying to make is this: yes, our troops are killing people. People who are human beings. Human beings who have legitimate concerns about why we are there. The majority of these particular human beings, though, are trying to kill our troops. And it basically comes down to “kill or be killed”. That situation is far from being black and white.
LilShieste
Dude, as I said in my prior post, you really need a reality check. For there is NO “other side” other than denying reality on the ground.
Fat Lady’s already sung loud and clear. Though it appears +/- 30% of Americans and perhaps +/- 10% of the rest of the world are tone deaf.
Time to lose all that dead weight, Trust me on this, Robert de Niro wasn’t really Jake LaMotta fifty added pounds aside.
As long as he’ll insist on interpreting any statement to the effect that “You’re wrong, and here’s why” as a *personal * attack, there’s no point discussing it, Red. Just let him continue to enjoy his comforting fantasies. The ones that got us into this mess in the first place, and are miring us deeper in it, with an ever-growing body count, yes, I know.
But, outside the White House itself, the fantasists no longer actually matter in any actual debate. And the ones who still are fantasists at this point will *always * be.
As an aside, I don’t particularly agree with Der Trish, when he calls all the American kids in Iraq murderers and so forth.
Which is not to say he is enterely wrong. For the US Army, at the grunt level – as any other – is pretty much a representation of said spectrum of society. And therein you’ll find all kinds…just as in civil society itself, you have your sociopaths, loonies, ignorants, bigots and outright murderer (with a licence to kill a lá James Bond no less), rapists and so forth. OTOH, you also have – and naive as I may come off – a majority that are there either because they really, honestly believe in The Cause and/or are simply loyal to the oath they made.
Having said that, nothing would please me more than seeing BushCo in front of a tribunal in La Hague.
I know, I know, but a man’s dreams for a better future for humanity is the last thing that can be taken from him. If at all. Because I plan on taking mine to the grave.
Martin Luther King, JFK, Bobby, Gandhi, etc…not bad company to keep.
Agreed 110%, Elvis. But as luc’ said, I can’t quite understand why an otherwise seemingly bright and accomplished human being insists on building castles in the sky. Or, rather, in his mind.
Only reason I can come up with is an innate inability to admit you were wrong all along. And boy, did Mr Shvilenca (sp?) lay down some thorough reality beatings on Sam on the whole WMDs issue he was so adamant about back then and yet is so blasé about same now.
On merit his so-called arguments are just an echo-chamber of the bullshit BushCo (and now McCain although as you know he’s been frantically backpedaling ever since). So it doesn’t rhyme with the prior assessment given his other posts.
Color me totally 
with hawks such as Sam.
Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld, and Cheney, though not so young, are all pretty bright and accomplished, too. But it sure doesn’t seem that raw intelligence has any correlation with the ability to suppress one’s ego and set aside one’s preconceptions. In fact, knowing oneself to be bright, and having risen to the top of one’s profession, more likely *contributes * to a difficulty in honestly accepting the possibility of being wrong. David Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest”, about the McNamara faction and a war all our current Deciders managed to avoid, illustrates that, as does, even better, Barbara Tuchman’s indispensable “The March of Folly”.
Oh, btw, you’re thinking of the ever-patient and thorough Mr. Svinlesha, who fought ignorance here as well as anyone ever has.
But what can you say about someone who still today believes Saddam was building an aresenal WMD’s when even *Bush * has retracted that claim? Sometimes the fight is just futile.
You really have to start reading what I actually wrote. I have accepted that there were no stockpiles of WMD for a long time. You might even read in my first message above that I said it was a valid criticism of the war that there did not appear to be much of a plan for securing WMD sites, indicating either that the administration knew they did not exist, or that they were grossly incompetent for not planning to secure them if they believed it.
I also don’t think I’ve posted a message in the last six months that had anything particularly good to say about George Bush. His administration has taken incompetence to rarified new heights for a presidency. His attempts to communicate important ideas come across as buffoonery. He’s completely lost control not just of Congress, but of the Republicans in Congress. Four years of screwups in Iraq have turned a bad situation into a disaster. The way he’s communicated the war has stripped him of any credibility. He gives a Presidential Medal of Freedom to George “Slam Dunk” Tenet. I’ll do a little happy dance when he leaves the White House.
None of this changes the fact that I believe you have to stay in Iraq and do your best to keep the situation from exploding.
You want me to change my mind about the war? Convince me that staying there now is going to do more damage than leaving. I was almost at that point before the ‘surge’ started, because I saw no strategy (and elucidator, the surge is both strategic and tactical) that was sufficiently different to what was done before to make me think the outcome would be any different. I saw no evidence that the government of Iraq was taking seriously the need to purge its ranks of militia supporters and Shiites or Sunnis who couldn’t be trusted to be even-handed when quelling the insurgency.
The appointment of Petraeus changed my mind. The man has a stellar reputation. He was voted unanimously by a very partisan congress. His soldiers have been some of the only ones to have real successes in the areas they were assigned to. So now he’s been given the whole ball of wax, and he actually has what looks like a decent plan to have another stab at the cat.
If Petraeus comes back and says, “This war cannot be won”, I’m instantly on your side. If he says he’ll achieve certain objectives at a certain time, and then six months down the road fails utterly and requests another Friedman without sufficiently explaining why things went wrong and what he’s changed to fix it, then I’m out of there at that point.
My position is pretty simple. So long as the U.S. presence is helping and not hurting, and there’s even the remotest chance that things could turn around, they should stay. If either of those conditions is no longer true, time to get them out. You guys have already answered that question on your side. I’m still on the other.
The surge is meaningless. Total troops
160,000 Americans
120,000 mercenary and black water
200,000 trained Iraqis. If you can believe the Bush figures, that makes 480,000 not counting our countless allies .
If Bush and his group honestly believe this is the fight they have to win, then he should ask for a draft and a huge troop increase. Otherwise credibility is non existent. He just does not want to admit he miscalculated so badly.
Thinking maybe you got me mixed up with Elvish, who said:
Its easier if you remember that I’m the good-looking one.
Keep telling you, no Ontario Wowee before posting…
…RedFury , I think that you could probably tell from my posting history that when it comes to the Iraq debate, I am “on your side”, as it were. But lets be honest, there is “another side” to the debate-whether you suscribe to it or not. I consider that Sam Stone has done an excellent job of presenting the other side of the debate: a side that is represented not only by the current US administration, but also by a sizable amount of of the US population.
I think that it is quite clear that the United States invasion of Iraq has devestated the country. The figures over at the Brookings Institute confirm that.
It is incredible to think that after the billions of dollars invested into Iraq since the invasion that power availability in Baghdad (averaging between 16 and 24 hours of electricity per day pre war) has gone from 4 hours a day immediately post war to between 4 and 6 hours a day in February in 2007. An estimated 2000 doctors have been murdered. 12 000 doctors have left the country. People with access to potable water have dropped from 12.7 million pre-war to 9.7 million in 2006. People with access to sewage systems has dropped from 6.2 million pre-war to 5.6 million. Water treatment capacity has dropped from 3 million m3/ day to 1.3 million m3/day.
As of March of 2006 on average of 30 to 40 Iraqis were kidnapped on a daily basis. 650 000 people are classed as “internally displaced.” There are 1.8 million Iraqi refugees living abroad. In 2005 55% of all terrorist attacks world wide occured in Iraq.
It is absolutely clear that the objectives laid out in the Strategy for Victory have failed. The question becomes what should we do about it?
I find myself asking the question: if the US pulls troops out right now, what hope does a home in Baghdad have of gettng power 24 hours a day? Who will fix the water supply? How is Iraq going to get fixed? These are the questions that need to be answered if the troops stay, and they also need to be answered if the troops go. Yes, the occupation was screwed up, the reconstruction was fucked up, but without realistic answers to these questions, simply stating “leave it to the Iraqis” is a dangerously simplistic answer.
Pulling the troops out may well be the correct answer to this question, but the arguements in this thread fail to convince me. I personally believe that the current strategy had very little chance of success. I believe that the concerns that I raised in the “Strategy for Victory” thread (posted above) have been addressed as per many of the points raised in Sam Stone’s first and second post in this thread: but I believe the whole process is starting four years too late.
If I was the US administration right now, I would put my focus back onto reconstructing the country. Sure, the power station won’t stay up and running if people keep blowing up, so make the goal “lets get power to Baghdad”, then work backwards to figure out how to do this and keep not only the power lines safe but the employees working in the plant. The United Nations needs to get back involved in a stronger way and the effort needs to be more strongly internationalized. Granted, this is a simplistic answer, but no more so than “leave it to he Iraqi’s” or “stay the course”.
It is a shame from my reading of the thread that when people read Sam Stone’s post, they read his name, make assumptions on the nature of his post, and then post accordingly. My habit is to judge the post, not the poster before replying to anything I read. There is no obligation to agree with anything that Sam Stone has said in this thread, but engaging in a good debate in the Great Debates forum is hardly too much to ask for, is it?
Is it possible that there are U.S. troops somewhere between “hero” and “barbarian”?
Here’s the essential problem, Sam. You are making two sets of assumptions: the first set is flimsy, and the second depends for support on the first.
The first set is that “good things” and “progress” are happening, even as you admit that such signs are mostly glimmers, subtleties. The patient is wracked with malaria, but the fever has gone from 105 degrees to 104.9
And the second set is that these things are a direct and provable result of American presence, wouldn’t happen if we weren’t there, and will stop happening as soon as we leave.
For instance, you hasten to remind us of Muktada al Sadr’s (apparent) weakness. “Ecce pony!”, we are victorious over our enemies.
I, for one, wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the Malikites would seize an opportunity to put a hitch in his giddyup. It may just as well be an internal struggle within the Shia wing. The Shia are going to win, the only question now is which Shia. And, as I noted before, if the Malikites can use the American army to do thier “wet work”, why not?
The Shia are, for the most part, not engaging against American troops. Is that a demonstration of some recent affection? Or are they merely perfectly content to focus American firepower and sacrifice on their Sunni enemies? If our moving from being a referee in this civil war to being an active participant is your idea of progress, you are welcome to it.
I can see how it is a tempting option for the Bushiviks. Shia domination is pretty much inevitable, and can be draped in democratic bunting with a degree of legitimacy, the Malikites were elected, freely and openly, just as the Iranian theocracy was elected with eyes wide open. When they win, one could say with a straight face that order had been restored, democracy preserved, and make a mad dash for the helicopters. Victory.
All that is required is that the Sunni insurgency be either appeased or crushed. The Malakites have shown little enthusiasm for option A, and appear pretty well determined on B. Why not? Just tell the Americans that they are crushing “Al Queda” (which works out rather neatly, since Al Q hates Shia as much or more than they hate Americans).
al Sadr’s anti-Americanism is inconvenient to this cozy arrangement. Which is likely to grow increasingly awkward, as the vast majority of the Islamic world is Sunni. You think they will take kindly to our decision to move from referee to participant? How much Saudi money is supporting the Sunni insurgency? Egyptian?
And if they decide to intervene on behalf of their co-religionists then what do we do? Shit or go blind? And if Shia oppression goes beyond “civilized” bounds into nightmare? What do we say to the Egyptians, the Saudis, the Indonesians? “Ooopsy”?
Getting the hell out of Baghdodge is not a good solution, it is not an honorable solution. But when the options run from bad to nightmare, its long past time to go.
If you change your policy on the ground, expecting certain results, and in the early going you see glimmers that you may be getting those results, it seems like an odd time to quit and go away.
When Petraeus was confirmed, his plan was on the table. The Democrats had all kinds of ability to object to the plan then, and refuse to confirm him. They did not. They approved him unanimously, with glowing words.
So he went out to implement his plan. Now it’s starting up, and initial signs are in a positive direction. That should buy him some more time to see if he can take it to the next level. If he can’t, fine. But the initial results should at least give him a little breathing room to continue. Only half of the ‘surge’ troops are even in Iraq yet. Now is not the time to pull out. It might be in three months, or six months, or a year. It depends on what’s going on.
I never said anything approaching that and you know it. In fact, I said that I was suspicious of the ‘surge’ precisely because I thought it would cause people like al-Sadr to simply go to ground to weight it out. However, a fair analysis also shows that going to ground is costing al-Sadr and fracturing some of his support.
If my arguments are so weak, you don’t need embellishment to make your point. So refrain from it.
Well, that’s certainly the Tony Soprano interpretation. It may even be correct. My opinion of the Malaki government is pretty low. But it may also be that the Shiites are not exactly unified in their desire to crush the Sunnis and control the country. It may also be that the smart ones understand that if they oppress the Sunnis and declare control, they’ll probably lose the Kurds. The Kurds would be a tough loss, as there is a big economic boom going on in the Kurdish region. And I don’t think Shiite militia relish fighting the Peshmerga any time soon. So the situation is a lot more complex than you’re making it out to be.
Uh, I’ve got news for you. The Mahdi Army is one of the biggest targets of this surge, with the approval of the Malaki government. So which is it? Are the Shiites laying low to let Americans kill Sunnis, or are they being sacrificed by their own government as a way of getting rid of the competition? Do you have any cites that indicate either is the case?
Do you have any evidence that your analysis is the right one? Some cites indicating this is the case? Because I’ve read the opposite - that Malaki has been dragging his feet in engaging al-Sadr because his own coalition is somewhat weak, but he’s finally been persuaded that the alternative is worse and has given the go-ahead to take them on. You think he’s happy to have the Shiites seeing him order attacks on fellow Shiites? It’s put him under pressure. He’s been dragging his feet precisely because he didn’t want to do it. The fact that it’s happening looks to me like a hopeful sign, not a sign of a devious plan for a rival gangmember to whack the other one.
Very well put. I agree completely, and this is exactly why I won’t support an unconditional troop pull-out - who will do anything once we’ve gone?